Meanwhile Acer continues to grapple with Apple -- a company that once bumped it to fourth place. Speaking with Digitimes, Acer found Stan Shih compared Apple's products to mutant viruses and remarked that a cure was incoming. The report reads:

Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune.

Apple indeed seems to have a rather viral market appeal and a tendency to peter out and then come back -- as evidenced by the failure of Macs in the 1990s and the company salvation by the iPod lineup in the 2000s.

Mr. Shih also compared Apple products to the short-lived Betamax format, saying PCs are like the more popular VHS tapes. The statement is somewhat ironic, given that Apple CEO Steve Jobs often credits himself and Apple for doing away with defunct formats like floppy discs.

He did at last offer some kinder words for the competitor, though, saying that Apple was both creative and an innovator. He said that PC makers could learn from the success of Apple's integrated hardware/software approach, and its successful applications store (the iTunes App Store).

During the interview Mr. Shih also voiced another controversial opinion -- that U.S. technology companies will eventually quit the personal computer market. He points to IBM's recent 2005 sale of its PC department to Lenovo (Chinese) as an example of that. Of course Mr. Shih's statements discount that three of the top four computer manufacturers -- Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple -- are all American.

Mr. Shih's comments follow controversial remarks about Apple in late August, in which he said the company's tablet, the iPad, would drop from 100 percent market share to 20 percent market share over the next couple years. Apple's supporters are skeptical about rival tablet makers' ability to catch up.

"Nowadays you can buy a CPU cheaper than the CPU fan." -- Unnamed AMD executive